TWELVE TABLETS, SEVEN HILLS, AND A FEW EARLY CHRISTIANS

Written procedures assist in control from above; yet they can give those who are underneath a means of asserting their rights. But it is only rather rarely in Rome that the latter possibility comes to the fore.
William V. Harris1

During the contentious deliberations of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, a certain Mrs. Powel asked Benjamin Franklin, “What have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” His famous reply: “A republic — if you can keep it.”2 The disintegration of an earlier republic, Rome, weighed heavily on Dr. Franklin’s mind, to say nothing of the chaotic five centuries of tyranny that followed it. While the causes of the Roman Republic’s fall were complex and to this day are controversial, one undeniable factor involved the bizarre and lopsided distribution of literacy in the Republic.

A curious Roman “literacy triangle” centered on three groups: the legions, easily the most literate mass institution in the late Republic; the Christians; and most bizarrely, the slaves—particularly Greek slaves—who did much of Rome’s writing, and even its reading. The literacy of the legionaries and slaves contributed mightily to the destruction of the ancient world’s largest, longest-running, and most successful democratic society, the Roman Republic, while a few centuries later the literacy of the Christians enabled them to triumph over Roman paganism.

In many ways, Rome’s democracy resembled the earlier Athenian one in its fundamental aspects; in both, assemblies of soldier-citizens managed civil and military affairs and governed both city-states. Literacy played an important role in the two democracies, particularly in the later Roman Republic, where voting was by secret written ballots. Tragically, the extraordinary degree of literacy in the army, Rome’s burgeoning geographic expansion, and the much lower degree of literacy in the newly conquered areas combined to make the literate army the only institution capable of binding the vast new empire together, and so doomed the Republic.

The origins of Roman democracy hark back to the sixth century BC, when legend has it that Rome sent a legation to Athens to learn about Solon’s legal reforms, which loosened the noose of debt around the neck of that city-state’s poor. Then, as now, debt was a hot-button issue. Until very recently, all societies operated near the subsistence level, with little surplus of cash and goods left after the most basic needs for food and shelter had been satisfied. Spare capital, whether in the form of coins, silver ingots, cattle, or grain, constituted a scarce commodity, and the very few “rich” farmers, merchants, and traders who had some could extract a high price for it.

This scarcity of capital drove its price — that is, its interest rate—sky high. In the earliest agricultural societies, interest rates stood at around 100 percent per year — a calf or a bushel of seed corn was repaid twice over at birthing or harvest time. As societies became wealthier and capital became more abundant, interest rates fell: at the height of the Athenian Empire, rates for the best creditors hovered around 10 percent, and later, during the Pax Romana, around 4 percent.3

In Solon’s time, capitalists in both Rome and Athens probably charged farmers and city dwellers well in excess of the 18 percent rate quoted for that period by modern scholars, similar to that levied on today’s credit card holders. Back then, as now, these high rates drove large numbers of ordinary citizens into a downward spiral of rapidly compounding debt.4

Creditors exacted far higher penalties from defaulters two millennia ago; these included seizure of property, and the enslavement of both the creditor and his family. The resultant financial and social imbalances ignited the era’s main political flash point: debt reform.

Solon’s laws, discussed in Chapter 2, abolished many of those debts and provided the poor of Athens with modest relief from future creditors; most important, they outlawed debtor enslavement. The Roman legation to Athens would have brought home the same message, and Rome did subsequently appoint two successive panels of ten men each — decemvirs — that enacted the famous Twelve Tablets. These statutes precisely spelled out the meager due process and grace periods for indebted Romans.5 The decemvirs probably wrote the original Twelve Tablets on wood in the first primitive Latin alphabet, which owed much to Greek influence. The tablets
perished by fire a few centuries later.

In early antiquity, the Greeks were the most powerful and influential of Mediterranean peoples, and Rome was not much more than a political, and certainly cultural, backwater; the Romans imported from the Greeks not only their legal system, but also, indirectly, their alphabet. During this period, both trade and colonization connected Greece and the Italian peninsula. Around 750 BC, colonists from Chalcis, near Athens, established the city of Cumae near modern Naples; there, the Greeks both warred and traded with the native Etruscans over the next two centuries.

Around 535 BC, another Greek city-state in Asia Minor, Phocaea, responded to its impending conquest by the Persian armies under Cyrus with what modern historians have called the “Phocaean option”: to sail away and replicate their city, along with its political and cultural structures, at multiple sites on foreign shores. The most famous of these later became Marseille; another was Alalia on the island of Corsica, where the Greeks again came into both commercial and hostile contact with the Etruscans.

At some point, Greeks from either Alalia or Cumae imparted their alphabet to the Etruscans, who adapted it to their language. The Romans, in their turn, adapted the Etruscan script to Latin and created the lettering that is today the dominant alphabet of the modern West.6

At the time that the decemvirs wrote the Twelve Tablets in the fifth century BC, literacy rates in Rome must have been very low, at most a few percent. It seems unlikely, then, that the Twelve Tablets represented any sort of triumph for the common man; rather, the patricians presumably formulated them in order to perpetuate the status quo. Like the Greeks, the Romans recognized several classes of citizen, the primary cleavage being between the plebeians (plebs) and patricians (patricii), the latter of whom descended from the senators who advised the first Roman kings and enacted laws.

The repressive nature of the Twelve Tablets is clearly revealed in their prohibition against intermarriage between patricians and plebeians, and particularly in the harsh punishment of debtors, which, despite the lessons of Solon’s reforms, involved being sold into slavery abroad or even executed. Admittedly, these provisions probably mirrored the unwritten common law, but their codification did nothing to loosen the grip of the patricians on Roman society. As had the written law in Mesopotamia and Egypt, the Twelve Tablets deployed the numinous power of the word in an illiterate society to enhance aristocratic power, not to share it.7

The rapid spread of Greek literacy in the fifth and fourth centuries BC coincided with the first written histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, who recorded, respectively, the electrifying events of the Persian and Peloponnesian conflicts. In Rome, literacy seems to have advanced in the third century BC, when the first known Roman historians, most notably Quintus Fabius Pictor, wrote about the First and Second Punic Wars.8

Paradoxically, in Rome, unlike Greece, the nexus of power and literacy was intertwined with slavery. While educated Greeks wrote reasonably well in their own hand, the few surviving writing samples of Roman intellectuals and aristocrats often resemble a child’s scrawl, for in ancient Rome, anyone who was anyone employed at least one slave scribe.9

How did Roman slaves acquire literacy? The answer is that they weren’t Romans at all, but rather Greeks. Since time immemorial, vanquished nations fed the slave trade of the victors; those men defeated on the battlefield, as well as their women and children, fortunate enough to escape the sword often wound up packed off to the victor’s homeland as war booty.

As Rome expanded, it acquired huge swaths of prime agricultural real estate in the Italian peninsula and in Sicily that fell under the rubric of ager publicus — public land. From these areas, and then overseas, the Republic likewise acquired large numbers of slaves. The term ager publicus was largely a fiction; these lands were in actuality latifundia: vast tracts privately owned by aristocrats and worked by the slaves acquired abroad. These industrial-scale farms tended to become ever larger as their wealthy owners accrued smaller plots from surrounding farmers who left to seek better prospects in the legions, and who sold their land outright or whose wives and children lost it to debt.10

The latifundia lasted for centuries, but the initial slave captives died off rather more quickly. Rome thus required a continuous flow of slaves to work most of its farmland, and slave traders who supplied the ongoing needs of this agricultural workforce followed its conquering legions. Nowhere is this process better described, and more relevant to the story of literacy, than in the Aegean region.

After Rome conquered the Italian peninsula in the third century BC, it set its sights on Greece, and the Republic began its first forays there around 220 BC. When the largest and most powerful western Greek state, Epirus, just across from Italy’s heel, fell in 167 BC, the Romans took 150,000 capita humana, who were presumably fed into the slave markets.11 By the middle of the second century BC, all of Greece lay under Roman suzerainty. Some Greek states, most notably Athens, allied themselves with the conquerors and consequently were well treated, but Rome made harsh examples of those who resisted, such as Corinth, which was sacked, rendered uninhabitable, and its people slaughtered and enslaved in 146 BC, the same year as Carthage’s destruction.

The slave traders sailed in the legions’ wakes. The Aegean island of Delos served as their primary entrepôt. Said the geographer Strabo, the island “could both admit and send away ten thousand slaves on the same day; whence arose the proverb, ‘merchant, sail in, unload your ship, everything has been sold.’”12

Thousands of Romans entrepreneurs and colonists emigrated to Asia Minor and the Aegean islands to seek their fortunes, and the stereotypical wealthy, swaggering “ugly Roman” soon became an object of Greek hatred. Oppressive Roman taxation forced many Asian and Greek peoples into a downward whirl of debt that led to slavery, while the slave trade itself attracted pirates who raided local sea traffic for human treasure. It did not help that centuries before Rome conquered Greece and Asia Minor, the Persians had outlawed slavery in their conquered territories, and its reimposition by the Romans deepened Greek antagonism in Asia Minor and the eastern Aegean.

This Greek animosity found its focus in the legendary king of Hellenic Pontus, Mithridates VI, a preternaturally skilled military commander. This charismatic leader cleverly portrayed himself as the savior of the Greek peoples. He organized history’s most complex and widespread act of coordinated mass terrorism: the surprise slaughter on a single day in 88 BC and in more than a dozen cities hundreds of miles apart, of approximately one hundred thousand men, women, and children—e.g., most of the Roman population of Asia Minor and the Aegean islands.13 He then proceeded to plague Roman forces around the Aegean and repeatedly eluded capture over the next quarter century until he was finally cornered into suicide by Pompey in 63 BC. Local anti-Roman anger was directed primarily at the Republic’s economic behavior, as symbolically and gruesomely manifested by the execution meted out to the commander Aquillius, down whose throat Greek captors poured molten gold, history’s signature punishment for greed.14

Historians are unable to even approximate the number of captives sent to Rome, but it must have run into the millions.15 So massive was the trade in slaves that many were simply fed into the gladiatorial maw, and occasionally even to wild animals, in the amphitheaters of the Republic and then the Empire, a fate most likely to befall captives from Syria, Judea, and the untamed wilds of Thrace. Those from Gaul and Spain, on the other hand, because of their equestrian skills, more often found their way into the stables of the wealthy.16

Luckiest, in a relative sense, were literate Greek slaves, whom their Roman masters treasured. As many of a certain age will recall, prolonged handwriting can be a tedious and even painful process. For such “scribophobes” the advent of the typewriter, and later the microprocessor and home printer, constituted nothing less than deliverance. No doubt, in previous eras, with much cruder writing implements and materials, many similarly detested handwriting, and when, beginning in the late third century BC, Rome found itself home to thousands of literate slaves, the local aristocracies must have looked upon these relatively inexpensive human writing machines with the same delight as today’s boomers did their first word processor.17

So strong was the connection between literacy in Rome and its Greek inhabitants that most of peninsula’s earliest historians wrote in Greek, and of the four bestknown “Roman” historians — Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Polybius, Plutarch, and Livy — all but the last were Greeks.18 (Halicarnassus — modern Bodrum in western Turkey—produced not only Dionysius but Herodotus as well.)

Slaves relieved the well-to-do Romans of the effort not only of writing, but frequently of reading as well. As the historian Suetonius relates in his biography of Augustus, “If he could not again fall asleep, as sometimes happened, he called for someone to read or tell stories to him.”19 Pliny the Younger records that his famous uncle, Pliny the Elder, was a compulsive listener of books, being read to constantly, whether walking, eating, bathing, enjoying a massage, or simply relaxing, and also kept at his side a “shorthand writer” to take notes when necessary.20 His uncle, of course, was no layabout; he was the author of, among many other works, the thirty-seven-volume Historia Naturalis and later died from toxic fumes while commanding the rescue fleet at Mount Vesuvius’s eruption.

Because of their fondness for giving dictation to slaves, the Romans probably invented shorthand. Tradition has it that Marcus Tullius Tiro, Cicero’s highly accomplished slave scribe-editor, pioneered the technique, although documentation of this oft-repeated chestnut is lacking.21 Modern historians have also asserted that by means of dictation to groups of slave scribes, hundreds or even thousands of books could be produced as cheaply as with the first Gutenberg-type presses, though this, too, must be taken with a grain of salt. One thing, however, can be said with certainty: when the Empire reached the limits of conquest and the supply of slaves ran out, the price of books rose dramatically. By the time of Diocletian in the late third century after Christ, books that could be purchased relatively cheaply in the time of Augustus had become nearly unaffordable to all but the very wealthy.22

That the Romans founded both public and private libraries around 220 BC, at almost exactly the same time as their first forays into Greece, can hardly be a coincidence. Modern historians have discovered evidence of about a dozen “public” repositories (that in fact belonged to the emperor), and their organization tells us much about the relationship between slavery and literacy. Roman librarians generally organized their collections into separate Latin and Greek sections. In those cases where historians can identify their workforces, most of the lower-level workers were either slaves or freedmen (manumitted slaves).

The Romans recognized two classes of library workers: at the lowest level were villici, who filed new volumes, repaired old ones, and controlled or assisted patrons; and slaves a bybliothece, who repaired and copied sections of manuscripts. In addition, the wealthiest private households, such as Cicero’s, employed large numbers of a third class of slaves and freedmen — librarii — essentially, human copying machines who reproduced whole volumes from other collections or manufactured duplicates from those of their masters as “backups” or gifts.23

The craft of the librarius was painstaking; he first wrote out the manuscript on separate sheets of papyrus, similar to the leaves of a modern book. Next, he oiled the pages for protection against vermin and the elements. Then he assembled them into a scroll by gluing the pages end to end, smoothing the first and last pages and attaching the top of the former and the bottom of the latter to painted sticks, each end of which might be capped with carved ivory. Finally, he appended an elegantly inscribed title page and constructed a colored envelope for the scroll, usually from parchment. The final product, which held the text of a small modern volume, was precious indeed.24 It goes without saying that villici, bybliothece, and librarii all required a high degree of literacy.

Over time, scribal slavery broke free of its Greek moorings. Non-Greek foreign captives might be literate or be trained in Latin and Greek after capture.25 A literate Roman citizen might default on debt and become an enslaved scribe. Expositio — the abandonment, usually in well-known public places, of infants by the poor — also seems to have provided wealthy Romans with large numbers of young educable slaves, and it was not unknown for successful foundlings to be reclaimed by their mothers. (Most victims of this practice, unfortunately, were female, and thus not eligible for education; a well-known saying in both ancient Greece and Rome ran, “If it is a boy, rear it; if it is a girl, throw it out.”) A majority of survivors of expositio became slaves, but adoptive parents occasionally raised these children to be free men and women.26

Aristocratic slaveholders often viewed their chattel as worthy of educational investment, as illustrated by a scene from Petronius’s play Satyricon. Trimalchio, an uncouth nouveau riche social climber, conducts a wild, drunken banquet during which he plants a long, affectionate kiss on the mouth of his handsome slave boy. When his wife Fortunata, herself a recently freed slave chorus girl, protests, Trimalchio evenly observes, “I gave this model slave a kiss not because he’s handsome, but because he applies himself so well. He knows his tens-times table. He can read at sight.”27

The wise master thus had a keen eye for human capital, and the wealthiest Romans picked out the brightest slave boys for special schools, paedagogia, where they received educations that could be the equal of those given the master’s own sons. If a literate slave performed well in later life, he might be manumitted and retained as a secretary, bookkeeper, or chamberlain; presumably, the prospect of manumission also served as an incentive to the slave workforce.

Slaveholders sought and cultivated particular talents, such as those of the comoedi, who entertained guests with comic and dramatic readings. According to Seneca, Roman slave owners prized those with the deftest tongues, who were kept “under a teacher to sharpen their skill in impudence, so that they may become expert in casting studied insults.”28

In addition to slaves, another group of ordinary Romans stood out for their literacy — the several hundred thousand men serving in the legions. Starting in the late Republic, the increasingly bureaucratic legions forced upon legionaries at least rudimentary reading and writing skills, and the ability to read and write must have increased the chances of promotion. The military historian Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus wrote a compact “field manual” of army procedures, Epitoma rei militaris, in which he described how each eighty-man “century” mustered ten soldiers each night for watch duty, and upon relief, their names were entered on a list, so that “no one is overburdened or unjustly exempted.” For the same reason, legionaries made lists of those granted leave. Vegetius also recommended that military recruiters:

"Should test for tall stature, physical strength, and alertness in everyone indeed, but in some the knowledge of shorthand writing and calculation and reckoning is selected. For the administration of the entire legion, including special services, military services, and money, is recorded daily in the Acts with one might say greater exactitude than records of military and civil taxation are noted down in the official files."29

The legionaries constituted the cream of Rome’s manpower. Often, they were the educated sons of independent farmers who saw the twenty-five-year term of military service as the road to advancement, and on retirement they received a grant of land and a comfortable pension. Classical historian William V. Harris noted that he was able to document the illiteracy of only one legionary, in spite of the fact that he is generally skeptical about the degree of literacy in ancient Greece and Rome.30

The auxiliaries, a second type of Roman military unit, drew their manpower from the fringes of the empire and ranged from cultured and often literate Greeks to “barbarians” — Thracians, Germans, and Gauls. Yet even here, the incentive of promotion drove up literacy rates. For example, among Egyptian cavalry auxiliaries, all officers and approximately one-third of ordinary enlisted men could read and write.

As with other records and artifacts, philologists and classicists are most likely to uncover the papyrus and parchment documents that bear on the extent and role of military literacy in hot, dry climates such as that of the Middle East. Easily the largest of such finds — approximately two - thirds of extant Roman military papyrus records—was the spectacular collection of records uncovered at a Roman fort at Dura-Europos on the upper Euphrates in modern Syria in the 1920s.31

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, England became the modern hotbed of classical research, but the last place Britons could reasonably expect to find a collection of Roman military records would be on their cold, soggy home turf. Not that they didn’t fantasize about it; the historian Harold Idris Bell’s obituary noted that he hoped that “one day he would find a letter on papyrus written by a soldier on Roman service in Britain.”32 Bell died in 1967; just six years later archaeologist Robin Birley realized Bell’s holy grail at a fort the Romans called Vindolanda near the midpoint of Hadrian’s Wall, just south of the modern Scottish border.

Birley’s archaeologist father had purchased the Vindolanda site in 1929 and begun its excavation, and Robin and his brother followed in their father’s footsteps. Over the decades, the site yielded an increasing treasure trove of artifacts, but nothing in Robin’s training and experience prepared him for the day in 1973 when he found himself deep in a muddy trench, face-to-face with two thin pieces of wood:

"I... passed one fragment up to my assistant on the surface for his opinion. He examined the wood and passed it back to me, observing that it seemed to have some peculiar markings on it. I had another look at it and thought I must have been dreaming, for the marks appeared to be ink writing."33

Indeed, Birley had uncovered the first of over a thousand documents, written mainly in ink on approximately postcard-size thin wooden tablets, dating to around AD 100, just before the construction of Hadrian’s Wall. A smaller number were “stylus tablets” of inscribed wax on a wood bed. The wax was long gone, but the messages could occasionally be read by the faint markings left in the wood. How had the fragile ink-stained strips of wood survived nearly two thousand years in the cold, sodden soil? Apparently, the high concentration of decayed organic matter surrounding them and the very low oxygen concentration at the site combined to preserve the local birch, alder, and oak used as writing material.34

The Vindolanda Tablets provided historians with a remarkable window on Roman rule, particularly how a few scattered literate legions could co-opt and control a vastly larger native population. These records minutely detailed unit rosters, supply purchases, construction of weapons and buildings, and communications with other units and with the central command in newly founded Londinium (London), hundreds of miles to the south. Over the decades since their initial discovery, scholars have applied handwriting analysis to identify literally hundreds of different authors among the Vindolanda Tablets. Considering that only about eight hundred men were stationed at the fort, this suggests that the legions possessed a degree of literacy that had never before been experienced in the ancient world, and which would not be realized again until the modern era.

Perhaps the most famous, and certainly the most charming, of the tablets is an invitation to a birthday party extended from one officer’s wife, Claudia Severa, to another, Sulpicia Lepidina:

Claudia Severa to her Lepidina, greetings.

"On the third day before the Ides of September, sister, for the day of celebration of my birthday, I give you a warm invitation to make sure that you come to us, to make the day more enjoyable to me by your arrival... Give my greetings to your [husband] Cerialis. My [husband] Aelius and my little son send him their greetings. I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper and hail."35

Like most Roman correspondence, this invitation was written in multiple hands. Typically, the author dictated the letter to an assistant or slave, then added his or her own handwritten salutation or addendum. As in Italy, slaves penned many of the Vindolanda letters, and correspondence among Vindolanda’s slaves was not uncommon.36

This body of documents makes clear the advantages that the Romans possessed over the illiterate native population. On hardly more than a moment’s notice, commanders could fashion precise written orders, unencumbered by the shackles of human memory, to organize and coalesce forces in a way that their local opponents could not.37 In short, the Romans conquered most of their known world as much with the deeply institutionalized pen as with the sword, shield, and catapult.

The names of the soldiers, officers, and their families at Vindolanda reveal that many came either from Tungria — roughly, the modern Franco-Belgium border area — or Batavia, just to the north of that, approximately the area around Nijmegen, in today’s Netherlands; Julius Caesar had pacified both areas around 58 BC. Such was the pattern employed by the Romans during their centuries of conquest: first, recruit the ablest soldiers from recently pacified local populations overawed by the legionaries’ size, military prowess, technology, and literacy; second, teach the new troops not only to fight but also to read and write Latin (or, in the East, Greek); and last, employ these intellectually and physically impressive specimens to conquer, pacify, overawe, and recruit adjoining peoples. The Romans first invaded England in force in AD 43, and by AD 100 Britons themselves served as legionaries on the European mainland.

Beyond the confines of the army, the aristocracy, and their slaves, not much more than a few percent of Rome’s peoples could read or write; outside the capital, the literacy rate was even lower. Here, then, in perhaps its most distilled form, was the despotic literacy of the Egyptians and Mesopotamians: a relentlessly efficient engine of oppression borne of stylus and ink and concentrated in Rome’s organ of subjugation, the legions.

We can now give voice to Benjamin Franklin’s famous worry that the new American republic might suffer the same fate as the Roman one. While historians have variously blamed the fall of the Roman Republic on the formation of the First Triumvirate of Julius Caesar, Pompey, and Crassus in 60 BC; Julius Caesar’s crossing of the Rubicon in 49 BC; his assassination in 44 BC; or the accession as emperor of his grand-nephew (and adopted son) Augustus in 27 BC, the roots of the Republic’s demise, in fact, lay more than two centuries before those occurrences. No one captured its essence better than Montesquieu, who in 1753 intuited that Rome had simply gotten too large to be governed effectively: “The unbounded extent of the Roman Empire proved the ruin of the Republic.”38 More recently, historians have confirmed and built upon Montesquieu’s incisive thesis.

Before exploring this new history of the Republic’s collapse, it helps to recap one of the key lessons of Chapter 1: the relationship among group size, political structure, and literacy. Recall “Dunbar’s number,” the maximum number of human beings who can maintain a stable governing relationship through direct contact, generally felt to be approximately 150. When everyone in a small group has direct face-to-face access to every other member, its structure tends to be relatively democratic, as is seen in most hunter-gatherer tribes, small farming settlements, and pirate ships. Literacy, especially when limited to a small elite, allows commandand - control down through multiple levels of authority, and thus over exponentially larger numbers of subjects, and so encourages despotism.

Notes

1. William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy, 206.
2. Anonymous, “Papers of Dr. James McHenry on the Federal Convention of 1787,” The American Historical Review 11:3 (April 1906), 618. The referenced quotes are reconstructed from Dr. McHenry’s somewhat fragmentary notes.
3. Sydney Homer and Richard Sylla, A History of Interest Rates, 4th ed. (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2005), 40–41, 56.
4. Recent behavioral research demonstrates that humans tend to grossly underestimate the fiscal damage that can be done by debt that compounds at high rates; see, for example, W. A. Wagenaar and H. Timmers, “Extrapolation of exponential time series is not enhanced by having more data points,” Perception and Psychophysics 24:2 (1978): 182–184.
5. Hans Julius Wolff, Roman Law (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1951), 54–59.
6. The Greek-to-Etruscan-to-Latin sequence, though representing the consensus of modern philologists, is not universally accepted; others have postulated the direct adoption of Greek script by the Romans. See Naveh, Early History of the Alphabet, 186; Arthur E. Gordon, “On the Origins of the Latin Alphabet: Modern Views,” California Studies in Classical Antiquity 2 (1969): 157–170; and Rhys Carpenter, “The Alphabet in Italy,” American Journal of Archaeology 49:4 (October–December 1945): 452–464. Carpenter points out that the early runic alphabets of northern Europe bear a striking resemblance to Etruscan, which may have been imparted to them through trade contacts.
7. For a detailed discussion of the political considerations surrounding the Twelve Tablets, see Walter Eder, “The Political Significance of the Codification of Law in Archaic Societies: An Unconventional Hypothesis,” in Kurt A. Raaflaub, Ed., Social Struggles in Archaic Rome (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 262–300.
8. Harriet I. Flower, Roman Republics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 38–39.
9. William V. Harris, Ancient Literacy, 249.
10. Keith R. Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World, 140 BC–70 BC (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 19.
11. For a discussion of the relevant entries in Plutarch, Livy, and Polybius, see N. G. L. Hammond, Epirus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), 635.
12. Strabo, Geography 14.5.2. See also W. A. Laidlaw, A History of Delos (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1933), 266–267.
13. Adrienne Mayor, The Poison King (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 13–22.
14. William V. Harris, “On War and Greed in the Second Century BC,” The American Historical Review 76:5 (December 1971): 1372. This act was most famously said to have been meted out to Crassus’s already dead body by victorious Parthian soldiers; its metaphorical nature seems to possess a certain universality, since the Incas also applied it to the Spanish official Vincente de Valverde in 1541.
15. For a rough idea of slave imports into Rome, see Frank Tenney, An Economic Survey of Ancient Rome (Paterson, NJ: Pageant Books, 1959), I:187–188.
16. See, for example, Mary L. Gordon, “The Nationality of Slaves under the Early Roman Empire,” The Journal of Roman Studies 14 (1924): 93–111.
17. The terms for many modern machines were initially associated with the humans who operated them: thus, in the late nineteen century business executives frequently attempted to seduce their typewriters.
18. Flower, 38–41.
19. Suetonius, The Lives of the Twelve Caesars: D. Octavius Caesar Augustus 76, http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl? dbname=PerseusLatinTexts&getid=1&query=Suet.%20Aug.76, accessed 6/28/12.
20. The Letters of Pliny the Younger, III.5, http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/bl_text_plinyltrs3.htm, accessed 9/23/20.
21. William C. McDermott “M. Cicero and M. Tiro,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschicte 21:2 (Second Quarter, 1972): 271–272.
22. See, for example, John M. Lenhart, “The Origin of the Invention of Printing: Its Background,” Catholic Historical Review 25:3 (October 1939): 303; and Felix Reichmann, “The Book Trade at the Time of the Roman Empire,” Library Quarterly 8:1 (January 1938): 62–63.
23. Romans also recognized another class of library worker, librarioli, who performed janitorial tasks, and of whom literacy was presumably not required; see George F. Houston, “The Slave and Freedman Personnel of Public Libraries in Ancient Rome,” Transactions of the American Philological Association, 132 (2002): 139–176.
24. Martin, 58–59.
25. Harris, Ancient Literacy, 257.
26. John Eastburn Boswell, “Expositio and Oblatio: The Abandonment of Children in the Ancient and Medieval Family,” American Historical Review 89:1 (February 1984): 10–33; and William V. Harris, “Towards a Study of the Ancient Slave Trade,” Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome 36 (1980): 123.
27. Petronius, Satyricon LXXV, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5225/5225-h/5225-h.htm, accessed 9/30/10.
28. Clarence A. Forbes, “The Education and Training of Slaves in Antiquity,” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association 86 (1955): 334–342, quote, 341.
29. Vegetius: Epitome of Military Science, N. P. Milner, Trans. (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1996), 51–52.
30. Harris, Ancient Literacy, 253–255.
31. See especially the table of contents in Robert O. Fink, Roman Military Records on Papyrus (Cleveland: Case Western University Press, 1971), ix–xiii.
32. “In Memoriam, Harold Idris Bell,” 1879–1967, The Journal of Roman Studies 57:1/2 (1967): xiii.
33. Robin Birley, On Hadrian’s Wall (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), 132.
34. Professor Alan K. Bowman, personal communication.
35. Alan K. Bowman, Life and Letters on the Roman Frontier (London: British Museum Press, 1994), 127.
36. Alan Bowman and David Thomas, The Vindolanda Writing Tablets (London: British Museum Press, 1994), 29–30.
37. Ibid., 24, 42–49.
38. Baron de Montesquieu, Reflections on the Causes of the Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire (London: Printed for W. Innys in Pater-noster Row, C. Davis against Gray’s-Inn Gate, Holborn, R. Manby on Ludgate-Hill, and H. S. Cox in Pater-noster Row, 1753), 147.
39. In spite of a rapidly increasing population, U.S. House membership has been limited to 435. (In 1959 the number temporarily increased to 437 after the admission of Alaska and Hawaii.)
40. Fergus Millar, The Crowd in Rome in the Late Republic (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998), 13–20.
41. C. Nicolet, The World of the Citizen in Republican Rome, P. S. Falla, Trans. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980), 137.
42. George Willis Botsford, The Roman Assemblies from their Origin to the End of the Republic (New York: Macmillan Company, 1909), 262–263.
43. Flower, 45.
44. Edward E. Best, “Literacy and Roman Voting,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschicte 23:4 (Fourth Quarter 1978): 428–438. See also Flower, 72–75.
45. Jürgen von Urgern-Sternberg, “The Crisis of the Republic,” in Harriet Flower, Trans. and Ed., The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 90.
46. Flower, Roman Republics, 5, 39, 87–88.
47. Millar, 197–225. Confusingly, ambitus could also mean the crime of political corruption, usually through bribery.
48. Made famous by Peter Pan: you can fly only if you believe you can.
49. Flower, The Roman Republics, 101.
50. A. W. Lintott, Violence in Republican Rome (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968), 74.
51. Flower, The Roman Republics, 86–87.
52. Ibid., 82–85.
53. Montesquieu, 146.
54. Sallust, The Jurgurthine War 65:4–5 (London: Penguin Books, 2007), 102.
55. Flower, The Roman Republics, 159.
56. Christopher S. Mackay, Ancient Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 103 126.
57. Von Ungern-Sternberg, 98–100. See also Flower, The Roman Republics, 93.
58. Caesar’s famous cry “Et tu, Brute?” was pure Shakespearean invention; according to Plutarch, he speaks (in Latin) to the first assailant, Casca, whom he has successfully stymied: “Accursed Casca, what does thou?” Casca then implores his nearby brother, in Greek, “Brother, help,” and they initiate the stab-fest. Plutarch,
The Life of Julius Caesar, 66.
59. Recall that Coptic’s similarity to demotic allowed Jean-François Champollion to decipher the Rosetta Stone. Today, the term “Coptic” carries multiple connotations, including the above-described alphabet, the last incarnation of the Egyptian language before it was replaced by Arabic, the indigenous Egyptian Christians, and, finally, their religion itself.
60. Keith Hopkins, “Conquest by book,” in J. H. Humphrey, Ed., “Literacy in the Roman World,” Journal of Roman Archaeology Supplementary Series 3 (1991): 144–148.
61. Ibid., 148.
62. Ibid., 86.
63. Stephen J. Davis, The Early Coptic Papacy (Cairo: American University Press in Cairo, 2004), 28–30.
64. H. I. Bell, “Evidences of Christianity in Egypt during the Roman Period,”The Harvard Theological Review 37:3 (July 1944), 185–208.
65. Davis, 1–42. See also Jill Kamil, Coptic Egypt (Cairo: American University Press in Cairo, 1987), 39. Coptics revere two kinds of believers: martyrs, who suffer imprisonment, torture, and death; and “confessors” such as Melitius, who suffer only the first two.
66. See, for example, Davis, 22; also, Stephen J. Davis, personal communication.
67. Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 51–53.
68. Ibid., 113–127.

By William L. Bernstein in "Master of the Word',Grove/Atlantic, London, 2013, excerpts chapter 3. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa. 

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